Todd’s Indiana’s Attorney General, and I bet he thinks Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s real purty too, but that don’t seem to be keeping her from suing him for defamation. Why?

Well, since Ohio is a feudal fiefdom, where a pregnant ten year old rape victim can’t get an abortion, the child had to go to Indiana, where Bernard performed the procedure and in so doing got Todd so riled up he spewed all kinds of lies about her on national media and now she needs round the clock security.

Turns out broadcasting life-destroying lies about people is defamation, and Bernard will almost certainly successfully sue Rokita on these grounds.

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What a comedown for Todd Rokita. Once that ten year old hemorrhaged to death trying to give birth in Ohio, he’d for sure have been given Ohio’s Distinguished Service Medal. Now all he has to look forward to is a whopping legal settlement.

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Contribute to Dr. Bernard’s legal/security fund here.

LOL. Love the bit about educating Israel’s massive, massively powerful, population of violent bigots in the ways of kindly pluralism.

How did this country devolve into a farce, where millions of Jews cannot worship freely — or even get married?

Easy. It forgot to kick against the pricks. Israel let itself become a theocracy. Bad career move.

Filthy stupid yahoos who give the whole enterprise a really bad look.

Seems richly ironic, but once you drift into theocracy you can certainly expect this outcome.

And I know you’re more taken up with not being annihilated in an American gun massacre, but keep in mind that Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule and his merry band of authoritarian theocrats would love it if America looked like Israel. Only ruled by reactionary Catholics, not ultraorthodox Jews.

I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE FETUS

JUST LIKE THE ONE GOD’S MOTHER USED TO KNOW

WHERE HIS BLOND HAIR GLISTENS

WHEN HE GETS CHRISTENED

IN TEMPLES WHITE AS FALLING SNOW…

MAY YOUR DAYS BE MERRY AND BRIGHT

AND MAY ALL YOUR FETUSES BE WHITE

A [divorced] teenage mother from Overbrook, Kan., Ms. Fluke-Ekren slowly embraced the Islamic State’s ideology...

[Her first ISIS husband] was killed in an airstrike as he was conducting reconnaissance for a terrorist attack …

… Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialized in drones and worked on a plan to drop chemical bombs using them. After the man, Wamiq al-Bengali, died, Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Bangladeshi man, an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for defending Raqqa, Syria. He died while fighting for ISIS in 2018…

She was smuggled out of Syria in about May 2019 and married a fifth time, according to the statement of facts. But the couple separated…

And oh those rabbinical courts! Really get the job done.

Babe, that’s okay. On AK-47s we’re good. Might use you for grenades and belts, but our kids are already cool with AK-47s.

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She will proudly plead guilty today, her only regret being her failure to carry out 9/11-style mass murder on an American college campus.

Trump-Backed Candidate Who Said Christ Would ‘Reign in Idaho’ Loses Primary

No fear of life in prison either, I guess.

Gevalt.

‘Everyone was citing a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic.‘

Results like these are kinda funny, if you ask ol’ UD. I mean, at the gathering of French Muslim intellectuals and secular French intellectuals described in this NYT essay (the essay is about the increasingly popular French political right), somebody cites this numerical result, and quite a few Muslim attendees get all huffy. One of them walks out.

Yet how big a deal, really, is the result? After you draw a shocked breath, do you pause to ask how this belief is liable, in most cases, to play out in actual civic life? A lot of religious people, if you asked them pointblank, would probably say they feel like this – that divine trumps secular law. Why do you assume this means that they would fail to obey secular law if they live in a secular state? How often are they compelled to choose between the two? To take an example I’ve talked to death on this blog – The French have with remarkable success, far as I can tell, imposed a burqa ban. Nobody seems too bent out of shape about it. Most even marginally rational people know that they will have to make some concessions when their religious enthusiasms hit hard against the rule of law in a non-theocracy.

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I’ve drawn the comment in my headline from the same essay.

But since Meadows and Thomas did it all under orders from Jesus (their texts are shot through with Good v Evil), we can only join the editorial board of Compact (see post below) and applaud these servants of the Lord. Satan stole the election, but they fought the good fight and will be granted sainthood by President Waldstein in the Cathophate to come.

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Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has been hospitalized with Lying Low Syndrome.

Ben Burgis:

Compact’s founders seem to believe that the ruling class is imposing social liberalism on an unwilling majority. But the majority of our society is wildly socially liberal by historical and global standards — or even by recent American ones.

According to a recent Pew poll, fewer than 10 percent of Americans think that marijuana should be illegal, for example. Almost three quarters agree with the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage assailed by [Compact writers]. Two-thirds oppose laws that limit trans rights. As young conservative Nate Hochman recently acknowledged, polling shows that even young Republicans are “more liberal than their older counterparts on everything from diversity to LGBT rights to immigration to climate change.”

Few European countries have been as historically friendly to the kind of laws [Compact‘s editors] might support to defend “familial and religious” communities against “libertine” encroachments as the Republic of Ireland — and within the last decade, abortion and same-sex marriage were both legalized there by popular referendum. And they were playing catch-up. At least until some unforeseen cultural shift dramatically realigns public attitudes, any scenario by which neo-medieval traditionalists succeed in wielding state power to smite gay people who want to get married and women who want to control their own bodies and drag queens who want to read to children at the library is a scenario by which social conservatism is imposed against the will of a large majority of the American populace.

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In the words of Eric Levitz, Compact‘s editors share “the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority.”

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Compact calls itself “radical,” and UD‘s heart goes out to it. She knows radical – the smell of it, the sweat of it, the aching sweetness of it. Her radical lover, David Kosofsky (brother of radical Eve), massaged her feet after their long march together on the Pentagon and it all went directly from UD‘s feet to her head. Started feety, ended heady. She was swept up in the edgy epater les bourgeois truth of existence, and her sense of excitement, clarity, and superiority was … she could taste it, man. UD remembers attending a John Cage concert around thirty years ago at Harvard – it was put on by a group of undergraduates – and, you know, some affectless madwoman drags herself forward onstage and begins chewing her violin – and, bored out of her gourd, UD began glancing around, and there entwined on the floor behind her were two students involved in the staging of the show, and the way they looked at each other! The certainty, the arrogance, the excitement! Tell me about it, babes, thought UD, smiling at them. Tell me about it.

Right rads got the same thing going, only they’re clenching in the back row of a heretic getting burned at the stake. As I say, my heart goes out to them.

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Update: Thanks go to my friend Rita for telling me about the phrase RAD TRADS — “young Catholics who prefer traditional liturgy, including the Latin Mass, and subscribe to more conservative political beliefs and religious practices.” UD was reaching for this when she wrote “Right rads,” but Rad trads is double-plus-good! Rad trads are like the Rad rois Lucien Goldman recalls encountering when he first arrived in France in 1934:

There was a very strong royalist movement among the students and suddenly a group appeared which was equally in defense of royalism, but which demanded a real Merovingian king!

Seems reasonable to ol’ UD, and in making this law for at least one of its regions, India is acting in accord with a lot of other countries.

Karnataka’s high court, that is, has ruled that the hijab is not a required religious garment. Those who want a different outcome can appeal the ruling to the supreme court, though I doubt a higher court will reverse it.

The fear … is that the BJP is trying again to impose its Hindu majority agenda on the minorities by depriving them of their right to religion and their freedom of choice.

That’s a very reasonable fear; yet given the routine nature, around the globe, of restrictions on school uniforms, I’m not sure it pertains in this case. In the matter of India, UD is more scandalized by this:

[A recent] government introduced Vedic astrology as a subject in college curricula, despite opposition from several leading scientists.